The decision of the President-elect of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, to exclude the Spanish head of state, King Felipe VI, from the celebration of his inauguration, is nothing more than the consequence of growing unrest .
The government will not go to the inauguration of Claudia Sheinbaum: where does the conflict between Spain and Mexico over the king come from?
When a friend doesn’t invite you to their birthday party, something is going on. An act of disdain which, by sparing distance, could well be applied to the field of diplomatic relations. The decision of the President-elect of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, to exclude the Spanish head of state, King Felipe VI, from the celebration of his inauguration, is nothing more than the consequence of growing unrest . But, as with a birthday, we can look away and tell ourselves that our friend is going through a bad time or, on the contrary, wonder why he is angry.
Judging by the reactions, the Spanish government seems to opt for the first option. The easy reading, in this sense, could be this: Mexico has entered a period of populism that began with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and seems to continue today with Sheinbaum. The sequence has therefore hardly progressed: Mexico is the victim of a selfish lack of courtesy, which serves as a smokescreen for its internal problems, appealing to a distant past, and Spain responds in a sensible and institutional manner . The king is, according to the 1978 Constitution, the highest representation of the State in international relations and, therefore, if the king does not leave, no member of the family (in this case, the Government ).
The second possibility, arguably the most self-critical and complex in any type of relationship, requires us to confront the underlying problem: why is the Mexican government angry? The origins of the unrest have a clear date: the famous letter that López Obrador sent in 2019 to the King of Spain in which he asked him to apologize for the wrongs committed against indigenous peoples during the colonial period. A request which then received silence in response, and whose silence became more thunderous when, some time later, Pope Francis responded to a similar letter from the Mexican president asking for forgiveness for the “sins” committed by the Catholic Church during the conquest.
It is said that it is not those who want to offend, but those who can, and Spain – like it or not – still has this ability against Mexico, precisely because of their common past. The lack of response evoked on the Mexican side the imagination of an arrogant metropolis, while for Spain it was simply a populist act – again the setting. Although this last interpretation is the most widespread in the Spanish political spectrum, as we analyzed with Daniel Martínez-Lamas in an investigation into López Obrador’s speech towards Spain, the president’s proposal went beyond a simple exercise in emotional manipulation. It was, on the contrary, a real invitation addressed to Spain to jointly participate in a process of historical memory open in the country, and which involved above all apologizing to the indigenous peoples. Apologies presented by López Obrador himself in the name of the Republican period and also, as has been pointed out, by the Pope for the excesses of the Church. In this way, to complete the circle, all that was missing was the Spanish apology. Something that didn’t happen.
In light of this analysis, Spain has lost an excellent opportunity not only to heal historical wounds, but also to participate in the process of constructing Mexican memory. By not doing so, it provoked a feeling of contempt which fueled, alongside colonial memory, two other dimensions of memory: the republican and the neoliberal. The first, referring to the key role played by Mexico under the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas – a great inspiration, moreover, of López Obrador – with the republican exile, welcoming thousands of Spaniards who were fleeing the Franco dictatorship. The second, the arrival of Spanish companies in the country during the 80s and 90s and their growing importance in the control of strategic resources.
The conjunction of these three memories generated a sensation of strangeness which, to say the least, stirred the Mexican emotional terrain, with a mixture of images which range from subjugation and cultural imposition (colonial memory) to pillage resources (neoliberal memory). ), through the intransigence of a conservative and arrogant elite (republican memory). From this point of view, the decision of Claudia Sheinbaum (who, moreover, grew up and shared important moments of her life with republican exiles and children of exiles) should not be surprising. Whether or not we understand his decision depends on whether we choose to stay looking at his finger or, on the contrary, at what it points to.
